For readers of Harlan Coben and Robert Crais, Robert McClure’s rollicking crime novel of family and felony takes readers on a relentless thrill ride through the L.A. underworld.

Fresh off a nine-year stint in San Quentin, career hitman Babe Crucci plans to finally go straight and enjoy all life has to offer—after he pulls one or two more jobs to shore up his retirement fund. More than anything, Babe is dead set on making up for lost time with his estranged son, Leo, who just so happens to be a rising star in the LAPD.

The road to reconciliation starts with tickets to a Dodgers game. But first, Leo needs a little help settling a beef over some gambling debts owed to a local mobster. This kind of thing is child’s play for Babe–until a sudden twist in the negotiations leads to a string of corpses and a titanic power shift in gangland politics. With the sins of his father piling up and dragging him down, Leo throws himself into the investigation of a young prostitute’s murder, a case that makes him some unlikely friends—and some brutally unpredictable enemies.

Caught up in a clash of crime lords, weaving past thugs with flame-throwers who expend lives like pocket change, Babe and Leo have one last chance to face the ghosts of their past—if they want to live long enough to see their future.

John Leonardo “Babe” Crucci

I am a week out of San Quentin when my son pulls to the curb in his Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, an unmarked one that reeks of weed. The odor tickles my nose when I lean into the passenger window and say, “Hey, want to come inside, maybe have a drink?”
“At ten in the morning?” he says, and the way my son looks at me makes him a kid again in my mind: He is ignoring my question about a book he thinks I’d never understand, or he is behind the glass wall of a prison visitation cubicle gawking like I am a snake on display at the zoo.
What I sorely want to say to him is, What, you would rather us cruise around and get stoned in your pig rig? but I know that would ignite the tension hanging in the air with the pot fumes. So instead I say, “After paying my eight-year debt to society, I am entitled to twenty-four happy hours per day. C’mon, let’s get reacquainted before we get going.”
His bloodshot eyes burn holes through the windshield.
No, it would take a logging chain and two-ton truck to drag him inside my house. I realize at this moment that my son has a bad feeling about the shitty little bungalow he grew up in, this nostalgic juju that has his head spinning with thoughts of where we started and where we are now, of where we are going to end up.
I toss my car keys in his lap and I am thinking, Son, please, do not make our journey more complicated than it is.

Robert McClure read pulp fiction as a kid when he should have been studying, but ultimately cracked down enough to obtain a bachelor's in criminology from Murray State University and a law degree from the University of Louisville.

He is now an attorney and crime fiction writer who lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky.

His story "My Son" appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories, and he has had other works published in MudRock: Stories & Tales, Hardboiled, Thug Lit, and Plots with Guns.